#628 Bitcoin Is Inevitable with Max Keiser

Max Keiser is a bitcoin maximalist who first started buying the digital currency around $1. He has a popular podcast called the Orange Pill Podcast and co-hosts the Keiser Report with Stacy Herbert on RT network. In this conversation, we discuss bitcoin, economics, geopolitical strategy, mainstream adoption, decentralization, a list of famous people Max told about bitcoin under $10, and his price predictions. ======================= Whether you're an experienced crypto trader or just starting out, Kraken has the tools to help you achieve financial freedom. With the new Kraken app, you can easily buy and sell over 60 of the most popular cryptocurrencies in just a few minutes. Featuring a sleek new design and an easy-to-use interface, you can now take your crypto portfolio with you on the go, 24/7. Visit kraken.com/pomp to learn more or search "kraken" in the app store. ======================= LMAX Digital - the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading & custodial services - offers clients a regulated, transparent and secure trading environment, together with the deepest pool of crypto liquidity. LMAX Digital is also a primary price discovery venue, streaming real-time market data to the industry’s leading analytics platforms. LMAX Digital - secure, liquid, trusted. Learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Max Kaiser is a Bitcoin maximalist who first started buying the digital currency around $1. He has a popular podcast called The Orange Pill Podcast and co-hosts The Kaiser Report with Stacy Herbert on RT Network. In this conversation, we discuss Bitcoin, economics, geopolitical strategy, mainstream adoption, decentralization, a list of famous people Max told about Bitcoin under $10, and his price predictions through the end of this year. I really enjoyed this conversation with Max, and I think you will too. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First

• 0:47Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:26Anthony Pompliano?

  in crypto. Visit kraken.com/pomp now to learn more, or search Kraken in the App Store. Again, K-R-A-K-E-N, Kraken. Search it in the App Store or go to kraken.com/pomp. Next up is LMAX Digital. They're the number one institutional crypto exchange, offering clients the deepest pool of crypto liquidity on the planet, underscored by 100% uptime track record through volatility spikes. Leveraging LMAX Group's liquidity relationships and ultra-low latency technology, LMAX Digital is the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading and custodial services. Featuring a central limit order book, streaming spot Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrency assets, all paired with US dollars, euro...

• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

  And yen, just cross connect at their LD4 or over the internet to execute your crypto trading strategy with precision. LMAX Digital, if you've never heard of them, it's probably because you're not an institution. They're the number one institutional crypto exchange. They're secure, liquid, and trusted. You can learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp. Again, LMAXdigital.com/pomp. All right, let's get in this episode with Max. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Max, what's up, man?

• 3:03Speaker 02

  Pomp, pomp, pomp it up.

• 3:06Anthony Pompliano?

  During the break, when I was making sure that everything was good here, you were telling me that you don't follow me on Twitter, but you follow my brother Joe.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, Joe's the brains of the operation. You know, he's got all the sports stuff. I follow Joe. He's a mature guy. You know, he's the guy to follow. Joe Pompliano.

• 3:25Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, the fact that you figured that out so quickly shows your intelligence level because you're definitely right there. All right, I'm going to talk Bitcoin. For those that don't know you and your story, give us kind of the 30, 60 seconds on when you discovered Bitcoin and how the hell you had such deep conviction so early.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  I was, I was gang banged by Satoshi and that impregnated me with the idea of Bitcoin in 2011, when it was a dollar. And I had already been involved in digital currencies going back to the mid 90s. I invented one called the, it's the Hollywood Stock Exchange. So when I heard about Bitcoin in 2011, I was already prepped to dive into it. And so I started buying it at a dollar. As you know, we started covering it on Kaiser Report, the first TV show in the world to do so. We covered it all extensively. So millions of people, the first time they heard about Bitcoin. Point was through Kaiser Report with Max and Stacy.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  And we started aggressively buying into early-stage Bitcoin companies in 2013 with a venture capital fund we started. So we are early investors in Kraken, Bitso, Shapeshift, Bitfinex. We just made some investments recently in Casa and Swan Bitcoin and Infinite Fleet, which is a Samson Mao or Mao creation. So we've been really deep into it, as you know, Pomp, for 10 years now, and that's our story.

• 4:52Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you first came across Bitcoin, you already had kind of this, this mental framework to think about digital assets, digital currencies, other folks like Jesse Powell, et cetera, I think very similarly, they'd been doing things in video games. And so when they saw this, it just kind of fit into this worldview. What was it for you? Because I think you were into gold quite a bit beforehand, then when you saw Bitcoin, was there one or two specific things where you were like, bam, this is it? Like, this is going to work this time?

• 5:20Speaker 02

  Well, a couple of things. So I kind of quickly figured out that this was a new asset class. You know, I started my career in the 80s as a stockbroker. So I'm sensitive to looking at asset classes and what is an asset class. With Bitcoin, is it a stock? Is it a bond? Is it a commodity? You know, where does it fit as an asset class? And then you realize that it's actually a new asset class. And if that's true, then the world money management, which is huge, you know, there's $100 trillion worth of funds looking for investment. You know, if they get into this, it's going to be huge. The second thing is my background in digital currencies and gaming back in the 90s. I know that virtual currencies, to the mind of people online,

• 6:03Speaker 02

  there's no differentiation between a digital currency and anything else. It's money. To anyone who was in the gaming world in the 1990s, you know, you, once you get into it, whether it's Second Life, which had the Linden Dollar, or the World of Witchcraft had gold swords and things like that. Once you cross over, your mind starts thinking about this in that way. You just adopted as money. So I knew that people would would accept this as money. So you put those things together and then the price action just keeps going up. So that's that number go up technology and it keeps you keep going down the rabbit hole keeps push pulling you down the rabbit hole even today at these prices. I'm, you know, we're still stacking sats because it's just, it just seems like the only logical thing you

• 6:48Speaker 02

  can do. It's like a bulwark against the insanity that's going on in the world, you know, in Washington and elsewhere. When you stack sats, it's like a calming thing that you do to ground yourself in the Satoshi Bitcoin reality.

• 7:01Anthony Pompliano?

  So one of the things that's fascinating to me is, uh, most people know you for all of the crazy antics. People have seen the videos of you ripping up the $10 bill or at the Bitcoin conference, uh, yelling and screaming, uh, with Michael Saylor, et cetera, right? Which, uh, as I've gotten to know you, I think is, uh, part of the magic of Max and Stacy. But when you think about it from a pure investment standpoint, uh, most great investors would tell you that, uh, in order to be great, you have to cut your losers faster than anyone and you have to press your winners harder than anyone else. So from a pure capital allocation standpoint, you all started buying Bitcoin at a dollar and have continued to buy since then. Now, the reason why I bring that up is because

• 7:43Anthony Pompliano?

  there's a lot of people who discovered Bitcoin early on. Maybe they didn't have the conviction to buy a lot, or along the way they said, hey, I bought it at a dollar, I went to $5, then they sold it. And so what is the thing that has kept you kind of so convicted to not only see it early and have the conviction that this could work, but also to ride the most volatile asset over the last decade to what became the best performing asset over the last decade as well?

• 8:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, and Bitcoin is, uh, it has the ability to work on you, that the investor in many different ways. And part of it is psychological and part of it is just from a pure money management perspective, how much do you want to allocate, how much do you want to go into this? And as you get deeper into it, you realize that other people that are talking about it, their arguments are terrible. And that adds to my conviction. So, for example, I don't want to go on a huge Peter Schiff diatribe here, but his arguments are terrible. And I told Peter to bite, I sat down with him at his house in Connecticut for a couple

• 8:51Speaker 02

  of hours and walked him through it when Bitcoin was under $10. And every single year since then, over 10 years, he still, he mentally can't get into it. And when I see somebody like that, you know, I'm open to any argument against Bitcoin. You know, I listen to everybody every single day, give me the argument against it. And every time I hear something, it doesn't work, the FUD. It never works and it just increases my conviction and it increases the idea of what is the total addressable market of this asset class? You know, and certainly Michael Saylor has done a great job in saying, you know, that melting ice cube on the balance sheet, you look at the corporate world, there's trillions of dollars, you look at the money management world, there's trillions of more dollars,

• 9:36Speaker 02

  you look at it versus gold and is it going to capture part or all of gold as monetization? That's a $9 trillion to $10 trillion market cap? Yeah, that's all happening. So, the price is still cheap and then as a money manager, you know, you figure, I gotta own it, you gotta keep nibbling at it, it's still cheap. Bitcoin at this price is still incredibly cheap.

• 9:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What, you came from a fascination and interest in gold, obviously now have pretty much hard right into Bitcoin for a very long time now, probably one of the earliest people I know of that had conviction and held on. When you think about gold today, is it just writing on the wall, it's over? Do you think that it still has a place in some people's portfolio? How do you think of that specific asset?

• 10:22Speaker 02

  Well, I think we're seeing a migration out of gold into Bitcoin and the ETF market proved that. The money flows, the reports you're getting from brokerages tell you that money's being dumped from the gold ETFs and moving into Bitcoin, Bitcoin surrogates, GBTC and other areas. So we're seeing that migration happen right now. And it makes sense because it does everything gold does, but it does it a lot better. It's absolutely scarce, whereas gold is only relatively scarce. It's obviously more portable, it's more divisible, it's more useful, and it's unconfiscatable, which is gold doesn't have that attribute. People can confiscate your gold. It's cheaper to own than gold. You know, gold has insurance

• 11:03Speaker 02

  costs, it has storage costs, it has verification costs. You know, every time you do a major gold play, you've got to get the gold verified by a third party. With Bitcoin, the transaction is the verification. I mean, that's a phrase that I picked up on early on. And as a former stockbroker, you know, you realize that a lot of the cost that goes into brokering is in verification of the transaction. There's a huge, what's called the back office, just hundreds of people back there verifying trades and doing all the paperwork. With Bitcoin, that's completely taken out of the equation. The transaction is the verification. That right there, you know, eliminates an enormous amount of our current financial system. So

• 11:46Speaker 02

  you just compare to gold, it just, again, it just stacks up, it gets better and better. And I think that trend will continue. Certainly in the millennial and Gen X, they're totally sold on Bitcoin, they're never going to adopt gold. And the only buyers left for gold are really the sovereigns, you know, Russia, China, and others. And there, I think, when one of those sovereigns breaks rank and says, you know, we're putting Bitcoin on our balance sheet, that's just going to be another nail in the coffin of gold and another huge boom in Bitcoin. So we're seeing a once in a thousand years migration pump from the perception of the premier store of value, number one global

• 12:32Speaker 02

  Top tier money into something new and it happens to be Bitcoin.

• 12:37Anthony Pompliano?

  So before we talk a little bit more about the geopolitical landscape, which I think is probably the most fascinating conversation right now, you were so early, but you also tried to orange pill a ton of people. You mentioned Peter. Are there other folks that you went to that people either don't know about or folks that you had conversations with that just didn't get it, still don't get it? Like any stories from the very early days that would surprise people?

• 13:03Speaker 02

  Right. You know, as I've said many times, I was really hard trying to get Russell Brand, who's a famous guy in the UK into Bitcoin. You know, he, he was not really able to get what it was all about. This was again, when it was, you know, 50 bucks or so. I gave him some Bitcoin. I don't know what he ever did with it. I'm pretty sure he lost it. I saw him recently on his podcast, asking people to explain to him what Bitcoin is, you know? We, we had, if you look at Kaiser Report, we had several shows in his actual flat in London, talking about Bitcoin. So he must have amnesia. My friend Alec Baldwin, who I knew from New

• 13:43Speaker 02

  York University, when Bitcoin was under 10 bucks, 20 bucks, you know, I was talking to him about it and trying to get him into it. Alex Jones, of course, when Bitcoin was under five bucks, I offered to give him 10,000 Bitcoin to give to his audience as to spread the word because, you know, pomp back then in 2011, a lot of people were giving away thousands of coins as a way to spread the word, you know, when it was cheap like that, it was easy to do. So he, Alex Jones, he rejected the idea and said, no, no, that's, that's, that's, that's some kind of CIA coin. I don't want it. So he rejected it. He rejected that offer of 10,000

• 14:24Speaker 02

  coins. And the list goes on from, from there, you know, everyone I met, I was trying to get, get orange pill as we do. And I guess those are some of the celebrity instances.

• 14:37Anthony Pompliano?

  How much Bitcoin do you think you've given away over the years? I don't want to know how much you have, but how much do you think you gave away in the early days when you were trying to help people spread the word or drive adoption? Tens of thousands of Bitcoin?

• 14:50Speaker 02

  Thousands.

• 14:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Thousands? I mean, when you think back to that, worth it?

• 15:00Speaker 02

  You never, you never have enough. I mean, it's, you know, what can I say? It's, in some, you know, the Bitcoin phenomenon ultimately, you know, I like to think about Buckminster Fuller. You know, Buckminster Fuller was a visionary thinker and he made a decision early on in his life that he wouldn't do anything in life that wasn't beneficial for humanity. And he created the geodesic dome, he created the first electric car, or one of the first electric cars. And he thought strategically about humanity. And Bitcoin is something that's pro-humanity. Paul Tudor Jones even said that gold is a bet on disaster. Bitcoin is a bet on humanity, that it's going to get better.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  So, I mean, this is, part of this is being involved in something that's going to improve humanity, improve what our experience as humans, you know, on this earth. Because Bitcoin demonetizes violence, whereas fiat money really monetizes violence. You know, the petrodollar and the whole war industry. And it's all based on fiat money and money printing and the Ponzi scheme of money printing. It's a very violent area. Fiat money is the source of violence. Bitcoin is demonetization of violence. So, in that context, you're like, well, you know, I'm doing something, I'm part of a bigger thing. And with Bitcoin, everyone who gets involved to it with a big, in a big way,

• 16:27Speaker 02

  really learns to get humble and say, you know what, this is bigger than me. And there's something potentially that could be great for humanity here. People who are narcissistic egomaniacs have a big difficulty getting into Bitcoin. I think that's the Nassim Taleb story. He's rightfully proud of the work he's done with his books, etc. But he developed this narcissism that prevented him, it prevents him from seeing the humanity of Bitcoin. And so, he's essentially committed professional suicide with his antics of the past few months. And we see that with Nouriel Roubini or Paul Krugman.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  They've committed professional suicide because they don't have the humility to approach Bitcoin on that on that level. So to answer your question, sure, I gave away thousands of coins, but if it's part of the journey, that if it ends up being beneficial to humanity as a whole, then I think that that's something we can all be proud of.

• 17:28Anthony Pompliano?

  I completely agree, and I think people probably don't thank you enough along with a bunch of other people from early in the day of the work you did to drive adoption, right? Frankly, is we we can't know for sure, but we may not be here with some of those efforts. So it's pretty incredible. When you look towards today, we talked a little bit about geopolitical landscape. We had El Salvador obviously embrace Bitcoin and create this legislation around legal tender. I'm assuming that with the nice El Salvador hat there, I'm assuming that it is your opinion, but correct me if I'm wrong, that this is just one of many countries that will ultimately make this move. How do you see this playing out? And is there a number of countries or a specific country that ends up being like an inflection point or a tipping point where there's no kind of point of return?

• 18:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, the game theory, it's baked into the protocol. So the protocol is essentially a three sided piece of the protocol with the developers, the speculators, miners. And the incentive is perfectly balanced to create this beautiful, perfect money that has within it this game theoretical aspect that's a track that keeps moving up the ladder in terms of attracting more more enemies, if you will, you know, Bitcoin is a track is built, is designed to attract attacks. And we saw it play out recently in the geopolitics of mining and the mining concentration. Remember, the idea was, oh, China is too concentrated, there's too much mining in China.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  We saw that resolve itself by the distribution of mining, etc. And so as we move up to get into a nation like El Salvador, then El Salvador has been the victim of US foreign policy for decades, as has been the entire region. The US essentially treats that entire region as a They use it for, as Jack Mahler's eloquently describes, you know, the dynamics politically between Latin America and the US. And how the remittance model is really just, it's kind of a slavery model and it's gross, it's disgusting. So, uh, Jack Mahler's goes there, he spends three months in El Salvador and he is, Jack is so fully, you know, within the Bitcoin ethos.

• 19:44Speaker 02

  Uh, uh, and you know him, you've met him, I know you guys are pretty tight and we've met him and his family and his dad is a thoroughbred, uh, from Chicago, uh, futures trading and the whole family is completely inculcated in, in the ethos here. And he went there and essentially orange pilled the president. And then the president now is, is dropping this huge bomb of Bitcoin as legal tender and that immediately spread throughout the region. So now you've got eight countries in total in the region that could go to Bitcoin as legal tender. Then on the other side of the world, you've got Nigeria, which, uh, is going hyper Bitcoinization. Uh, with companies like Paxful, uh, which is huge there.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  And so now the country has also kind of come out and said, we can't stop it. Uh, we don't know, you know, we just gotta go with the punch. So there's Nigeria with 200 million people. Uh, huge mobile phone penetration, they're going to go fully Bitcoinized. So these two areas are exploding in Bitcoin and that, and that's part of the game theory is that they want to become, um, they're, they're competitive, you know, this is the thing about America. America thinks that it's really this entrepreneurial, super competitive place that's running the world. It, it's when you compare it to like a Nigeria with the average age is less than 25 and you've got people now hyper Bitcoinized and there are, they're out hustling like unbelievably every single day.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  They're, they're like mad. If you've ever been to countries, Africa as I have, or the Middle East as I have, or different countries all over the world, there's a different perception of what constitutes hustle, right? I mean, these people. Or mad hustling absolutely 24/7 working it. And now they've got Bitcoin. So these economies are going to grow really fast. Uh, Pomp, and that's going to attract, and the game theory is it attracts other countries and other people. And they're on the phone and they, we're, we're doing it. So it, that's how the Bitcoin revolution is taking hold, is totally peaceful. Uh, without a shot fired, the Bitcoin revolution will take hold. And, uh, so I think that Africa is, as a continent,

• 21:58Speaker 02

  you, you see it spreading wildly in Botswana, Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria. You know, that's where, this is, this is really where the huge revolution is taking place. And then Latin America. I think the US is one of the last countries to really get into it because we're the beneficiary of having the world reserve currency. The US dollar, you know, we're, we're basically the, running the, this colonial US dollar hegemony nightmare for decades. Censoring since 1971, when Nixon closed the gold window and he went on the petrodollar. So the US is kind of the last country to get on board, I think, sadly. Uh, and we see that being played out in Washington DC right now. You know, Bitcoin hit, hit Congress, you know, Bitcoin went to Washington.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  And we're seeing the dynamics play out. And so you stack up, stack what's happening in Congress this week versus Nigeria, versus El Salvador. And you see that, and, and Senator Lummis makes this excellent point. You know, she says, the US is way behind, right? That's exactly right. The US is way behind. So is it going to catch up? Well, if it is going to catch up, Pomp, it's gotta start making some moves fast, quick.

• 23:09Anthony Pompliano?

  If you were the US, what would you do right now? Is it a, hey, go spend a bunch of money in the infrastructure bill to set up mining operations? Do you make Bitcoin legal tender? Do you buy Bitcoin and put it in the balance sheet? Like, what would you do if Max Kaiser is president and wants Bitcoin to be successful? What does Max Kaiser do?

• 23:27Speaker 02

  Well, I think I was the one who coined the phrase hash war, uh, maybe two and a half years ago, that countries would get into competitive hashing and because the idea is that governments are not going to ban Bitcoin, the smart governments are going to start hoarding and mining Bitcoin. So to the extent that the US becomes competitive, they would have to immediately start to underwrite mining, right? So I mean, uh, that's what you'd have to do right away. And that's the way to build a solid economy going forward. So I would start directing funds toward mining and I would obviously look at a place like Texas

• 24:07Speaker 02

  where the cost of energy is competitive globally and build that out right away. Um, he who has the Bitcoin makes the laws and the countries that are really active in this the most are going to be extremely happy that they did. Those countries that lag behind are going to be, um, you know, part of the new second world, right? We're reordering how, what constitutes a first world nation. The first world nation will be heavily into Bitcoin and then the second and third world will be lagging in Bitcoin. So if the US wants to be competitive, they need to immediately start directing resources in multiple ways to start to accumulate and mine Bitcoin.

• 24:49Anthony Pompliano?

  My brothers have a couple of questions for you, but before I let them ask one more for you is, uh, the difference between the federal government and the states. It seems like states seem to be taking the lead here. Uh, is that a good thing? Should we encourage more states to do that? How do you see the difference between the two and how that plays out for Bitcoin?

• 25:05Speaker 02

  Right. Well, the US has an advantage over Europe in this regard, that the states have autonomy to a large degree and they can push through laws and, and make big differences. And we saw that in the marijuana industry, the states got onto it first and then it's heading up to the federal level. Um, in the, in Europe though, it's generally more of an autocracy, top down from the EC, the European Commission, and there's very little room to maneuver. And Europe isn't in a really bad shape, Pom. I mean, I see in Germany right now. The entire yield curve is negative and more something many, many banks, almost all the banks now are charging customers negative interest rates to hold their cash. Europe is in steep, deep problems.

• 25:50Speaker 02

  But in the U.S., as you point out, you do have the states. The states can be, are somewhat autonomous and they can take the ball and run with it. And we're seeing it in Wyoming, you know, in Miami, the mayor is pro Bitcoin and that has a huge impact. So we can see if Wyoming suddenly steals a lot of business from Delaware, where a lot of companies incorporate in Delaware, and they start grabbing that whole business and you see a migration to Wyoming, that would have an impact. The Miami economy is set to do well based on the Bitcoin in, you know, activity there. And Austin, Texas is becoming a huge Bitcoin hub. Texas is becoming huge.

• 26:31Speaker 02

  Texas, if the governor of Texas could, could really break away and say, we're going to start mining Bitcoin on the state level in a big way, and it's a big state, it's they, they're attracting congressional seats. They're pulling congressional seats away from California because so many people are leaving California and they're, they're becoming more of a political powerhouse. And if they go full on Bitcoin, you know, that's going to be a huge difference. I mean, maybe that's where I would put my efforts, you know, more strategically is to get one big state fully onto Bitcoin instead of trying to get the federal government onto it. And that, I think that's a good point. I think that's a good idea.

• 27:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Joe, what questions do you have for, for Max? Since you're the favorite pomp?

• 27:14Speaker 03

  I was just going to say, Max and I are already friends after that intro where he gave me a shout out. I appreciate that. Max, you're someone who was buying Bitcoin at a dollar. You said earlier that you continue to buy Bitcoin even at the, the prices of today, forty, fifty, sixty thousand dollars. What is something, when you look 10, 20, 30, even 100 years down the road, like what is the bear case for you? What is something that keeps you up at night? What could go wrong? What stops total adoption? Is there any scenario where you see Bitcoin doesn't become the global reserve currency?

• 27:47Speaker 02

  Here's my bare case, is that humans will become extinct before they realize the benefits of Bitcoin. And let me explain. Nothing's gonna stop Bitcoin. You know, it's on its own vector. And it was the discovery of absolutely scarce synthetic digital commodity that can only happen once. Everything else but that's not Bitcoin is a security and should be looked at as such. And it's powered in a way that it can now grab that energy from wherever it gets it through solar, etc. It's almost to some degree self-aware, to

• 28:30Speaker 02

  some degree. I don't want to go down too far down that path. But humans on planet Earth seem to be on another path of self-destruction. I mean, humans seem to be really anxious to get into another world war. We seem to be on a course to tragically destroy whatever biosphere we have left. So the humans seem to be really messed up. So you know, the bare case is that humans actually go extinct, while Bitcoin's still powering forward. That's the bare case. The bare case is that humans never figure out that they can solve the problem that they're experiencing here by adopting a Bitcoin standard. That's the bare case.

• 29:10Anthony Pompliano?

  John?

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, Max, thanks for doing this. Nice to meet you. I'm also on Twitter if you want to give me a follow. But so you started learning about Bitcoin around 10 years ago, around a decade ago. Where do you see Bitcoin going in the next 10 years?

• 29:24Speaker 02

  Right. I see it. I see fiat money, all fiat money for the past 300 years has gone to zero or lost 99% of its purchasing power. See, fiat money has never worked. And so now we see something that's come along that's going to eat gold lunch. So that gold Bitcoin competition is very active. So that means that Bitcoin is going to eclipse gold. That means that it's a 10 to 11 trillion dollar asset. Right? So that's, that's a huge move still to come. And then if you look at the bond market, the bond market's in horrible shape. It's all 0% and going negative.

• 30:08Speaker 02

  So you could see a migration out of the bond market. The bond market's a $200 trillion global market. So that, that money could come into Bitcoin. The total adjustable market for planet earth of stuff that people invest in, property, precious metals, stocks, bonds, et cetera. It's like $400 trillion. It's enormous. You know, that's the total adjustable market of Bitcoin. There's nobody, there's no, there's no reason why anyone who, who is investing in something as a store of value would not want Bitcoin. And there's no way to show that it's not superior to anything out there as a store of value in terms of the penetration that it will make in the market going, you know,

• 30:53Speaker 02

  the next five years. And you know, the heavyweight asset over the past several hundred years has been the Ming vase, you know? And as a, as a stockbroker, you'd always hear the story about the best performing asset ever has been the Ming vase. The Ming dynasty vase has been, you know, compounding at a great rate for like 400 years, you know? It's been the heavyweight champion. People still buy the Ming vase. You know, Bitcoin will eclipse the Ming vase. You know, it'll be the champion heavyweight compounded annual interest return of any asset ever in the history of the world. It'll outperform the Faberge egg. It'll outperform the Van Gogh. It'll outperform a Mediglioni.

• 31:36Speaker 02

  It'll outperform everything. And that, that, that attract, because it's perfect. And, and so that is going to keep attracting people. It's the black hole of Bitcoin is sucking in every single possible value of anything everywhere. And so that's where we're heading and and it's it's unstoppable. It's unconfiscatable. It's uncensorable and it's available. You know, you can still buy it under under $100,000 a coin. That's a frickin bargain.

• 32:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Max, my brother John has one more question for you and then I got a couple to finish up. Prepare yourself though, because I don't want you to hurt yourself when you answer this.

• 32:20Speaker 02

  Max, I got my money gun.

• 32:24Speaker 02

  Come at me. Come at me.

• 32:25Speaker 04

  So my question is, I don't own any, but I know some of my friends do own Doge coin. What are your thoughts around it? What would you tell them? What mistakes are they making and?

• 32:39Anthony Pompliano?

  He's 25, Max, and a bunch of his, uh, his 25 year old friends, give or take, are buying Doge.

• 32:48Speaker 02

  Right. Well, understand that, you know, Bitcoin, as I said before, it was the discovery of an absolutely scarce synthetic synthetic digital commodity that is perfect in many ways. And everything else is is less than, or even everything else can be seen as a security. And everything else is centralized to some degree, right? Doge is centralized to the degree that it revolves around a character, a charismatic character, Elon Musk. So that's a, that's a point of centralization. If Elon Musk were hit by a bus today, you know, Doge would collapse because there's no, there's no competitive

• 33:30Speaker 02

  reason why you would own Doge over, over Bitcoin, because it doesn't offer anything that in that sense. So it has a, it has a flaw, a fatal flaw of it's over centralized. Everything that is not Bitcoin is either absolutely centralized, like Ethereum now has become absolutely centralized, or it's relatively centralized, depending on how you look at it. So there, there, there is no, um, there, there, there is, there is no happy ending for Doge owners.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  That the, but this is a, the learning curve that people go on. There's no way that people are gonna not.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  Decide that they know better, that this looks cheap, or they think, you know, the person at the center of it is a charismatic genius and therefore they're going to participate, and they're going to get wrecked. So getting wrecked is part of the learning curve. And, you know, that's true of anything. You know, the Wright brothers had a lot of failures. And every major entrepreneur, you know, you entrepreneurialism is not about being successful, it's about dealing with failure. Because, you know, for every success, you have many, many, many failures. And how you deal with failure determines your success. That's so, you know, you're gonna have, you're gonna get wrecked with those. You're gonna get wrecked, and you're gonna learn from it, and you're gonna end up in Bitcoin. So you

• 34:59Speaker 02

  can save the tragedy by just going directly into Bitcoin now. But, you know, I mean, there that show, remember on TV called Jackass, where, you know, guys would run, you know, drive a car into a cliff and set themselves on fire, you know. That's what people do. You know, they like to get wrecked sometimes. So people, that's what people do.

• 35:18Anthony Pompliano?

  You mentioned that Ethereum is centralized, and I'm scared to give you the floor, but explain what you mean by that. And, and kind of maybe the, the way that you view the smart contract platforms and the inevitability that they all end up being centralized.

• 35:35Speaker 02

  Well, it's not, it's not decentralized for a few different reasons. So, you know, first of all, you don't have the ability to run your own node like you do in Bitcoin. It's, it's a huge albatross. That's not, it's not workable. Nobody runs their own node. They're all outsourced to centralized locations. A lot of them are on AWS, America, Amazon Web Services. Number two, we know that transactions are reversible. That's happened before. That doesn't, that doesn't tell me it's decentralized. That tells me it's more centralized. They keep coming out with these upgrades. That's not decentralization, that's centralization. They're moving to proof of stake. Proof of stake is just fiat money version. Anything proof of stake is not any different than the fiat money world, where your, your, your stake essentially gives you governance, you know, priorities.

• 36:23Speaker 02

  Which is very similar to what we have in the fiat money world. So you go down the list and you're like, you know what? This is actually not a decentralized protocol. I'm sorry, this is, yeah, it's not decentralized. It's centralized. And this is true. You know, you can make the same case for just about anything else out there. Everything that's not Bitcoin. Give me five minutes and I'll tell you the point of centralization that disqualifies it as a decentralized protocol to the extent that Bitcoin is decentralized. So that's just the beginning of that argument.

• 36:54Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that you do a fantastic job articulating this. You've been doing it for a decade. But what everyone wants to know is price prediction for this year? Price prediction for 2030? What do you got for us?

• 37:09Speaker 02

  Well, for my 2021 prediction is still the same as it was on the last day of last year. And that's 220,000 for Bitcoin in 2021. So I'm still holding to that prediction. And after, you know, I mean, I'm using this four year halving cycle where you see these types of moves and it's kind of fitting into that scenario right now. And following 2022, let's say, getting into the 2023, 2024 period. At the moment, my feeling is that it might not be a great year. Actually, we might see more of one of our historic pullback years that we've all. I've been through three 90% corrections in Bitcoin going back to 2011.

• 37:55Speaker 02

  You know, I've seen, we haven't seen, you know, those are very, very damaging. Or, you know, to one's spirit. But nevertheless, for 2021, though, I'm still very, very wildly bullish for 2021. I think we're now starting to see this crossover from the 200 day moving average. You're starting to see that the Washington DC experience has shown people that, you know what? Washington's actually powerless. Against this thing, you know, everyone is hoping, oh, you know, we're going to outlaw, we're going to ban Bitcoin and they all went there and they had their meetings and they had their votes and they had their sessions and then Bitcoin, you know, Tik Tok next block, it doesn't stop. And I think people are scratching their head like, wait a minute,

• 38:35Speaker 02

  you mean the US government really can't stop this thing? You know, I'm going to buy more. So we're seeing the US kind of fail in its attempt to stop it. And that's bullish. And so that's going to offer a lot of price support. The Michael Saylor's of the world, you know, he is, he's orange pilling trillions of dollars worth of cash on the sidelines. You know, Michael Saylor is, you know, has got the best pitch. I'll say that he's got the best pitch of anybody, which is great because he's got a lot of money and a lot of Bitcoin. So we've got like Ted Williams in the batter's box right now, you know, or Gordie Howe or

• 39:19Speaker 02

  Wayne Gretzky, or whoever you want to use. I'll use a Joe sports analogy because I know he's into sports. But, you know, we've got the Babe Ruth of, you know, pitching Bitcoin pitchers, you know, there and doing his job. And that means a lot of companies all over the world, the dominoes will fall, just like countries will fall. I think one, all we need is one other country to announce Bitcoin legal tender in a big way, or one major company with multi trillion dollars on the assets balance sheet that they're going to go Bitcoin. All we need is one more in 2021, and you're going to see a 40 to 50,000 point gap, dollar gap, you know, in a week.

• 40:01Anthony Pompliano?

  So 2030, what's the price prediction? Basically a decade from now?

• 40:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, again, you know, you get into a different kind of thinking when you look over that period, Pop, because, because we're talking about a world where fiat money as we know it is no more. And that's a very, very different world. It's a

• 40:27Speaker 02

  You know, it's a world where you have consensus that's built into the Bitcoin protocol, applied to society at large and countries in the world. That's where we're headed. So it means just a completely different world beyond the price. I think we're getting to a point, and by 2030, I think people, the last thing people will ever talk about when they talk about Bitcoin is the price. Because they'll just be living inside the protocol, so to speak. That protocol, the genius of the incentive model, the protocol, will bring in our society. You know, we all have this kind of, not to get too metaphysical here,

• 41:12Speaker 02

  but we all live kind of with this common unconscious or the collective unconscious. That's a completely unexplored area. As a human species, we're all one, but we act as if we're different and we're all in contention. Okay, put the perfect consensus protocol into the societal mix of humans and see what happens. And I think we're going to see war and violence completely weeded out of the situation. We're heading to a very loving and peaceful future. That's where we're headed, and within 10 years, potentially. So all the prophets from all the ages, going back 1,000 years, who spoke about potential in these terms, they weren't

• 41:56Speaker 02

  wrong. But they never had Bitcoin.

• 42:02Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that you are not only directionally correct through the end of this year, very bullish. I do think there's a point in the future, who knows if it's five years or 50 years from now, where the US dollar exchange price doesn't matter anymore. And I think one piece that when people hear your kind of monologue will focus on is price. But the idea that this is all done peacefully, right? Basically, this asset with no bombs, no bullets, no soldiers, no anything, is going to be able to bring financial security And really frankly, close the wealth inequality gap in a material way because you take away that debasement of the currency. There is a philanthropic element to this that

• 42:47Anthony Pompliano?

  I've said before, you know, will outweigh all philanthropy combined because you actually, from a first principle standpoint, get at the root cause of what drives the wealth inequality, drives a lot of the violence, etc. And I think that's exactly what you're articulating here.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, if you ask anybody in the, in the, anybody, anywhere, you know, what, what price do you assign to the love you have of your significant other, your wife, your husband, or your family? What, what, what, what price would you give that? They'd be like, that's crazy. You know, it's priceless. I wouldn't give a price to it. It's beyond price. And people understand that on an individual level with them, their loved ones, their family. Now, apply that globally. There's no price to it. And we could potentially be entering it, you know, the Bitcoin singularity, which is approaching within the next 10 years,

• 43:41Speaker 02

  is a love bomb, essentially, that unites everybody on that, that base layer of humanity that is love, that we've all been, we all know about it, and we all, we, we have, it's, it's spoken about through art and through even science. You know, science is an expression of love in many ways. You know, I think Copernicus, or Galileo, or Einstein, they loved what they did, and the, and they changed the way we think, right? And Einstein introduced an idea that completely changed the way we orient ourselves to the universe, or Buck

• 44:24Speaker 02

  minster Fuller, or Galileo, or Copernicus, and the artists like a Picasso or other artists. They, we, we change the way we see as not only in an individual, but almost as a globe. So now, take perfect money, take the Bitcoin protocol. And the most fundamental aspect of anyone's daily experience is the interaction they have using.

• 44:46Speaker 02

  Some kind of medium of exchange or a store of value. That's how we quantify our lives. Once we made the transition from, you know, from, from just a nomadic

• 45:01Speaker 02

  tribe out there wandering in, in, around, you know, I saw something very, very interesting. Pomp, that according to archaeological studies. It was approximately 400,000 years ago. When the idea of fire went around the world like fire. So in other words, the population of the world was all separated, all tribal. And then this tribe started to press in on each other and there was a lot of mistrust. And they didn't really trust each other. But then that crowding in on each other got to the point where they were kind of like forced to consider the other tribes around. And one, and so the idea that one tribe had, which was using fire constructively, using fire to cook, using fire, taming fire.

• 45:45Speaker 02

  Caught on and it went global. And so the similarly with Bitcoin, you know, it's, it's, it started off very tribal, you know, they, the geeks, the nerds, the freaks. The cipher punks with, with Bitcoin. And now it's getting to the point where it, it becomes so obviously utilitarian, so obviously beneficial. Such a leap for humanity that it's undeniable. It's unstoppable. It's unconfiscatable. It's unsensible. And, and so that's the moment and the threshold we're on. You know, you, me are in an incredible moment in not only history.

• 46:29Speaker 02

  In terms of the last few hundred years, but in the, in the history of our species. I mean, why were we born to witness this? I mean, we are seeing something. I, I remember 1969 when men landed on the moon. Yeah, you know, that was something that took 100,000 years to figure out. And, and here we are in 2021. And we're about to plant our flag on monetization of the global unconscious on the base layer of love. With Bitcoin and we're going to have a fucking party.

• 47:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Before I let you go, you have a whole bunch of stuff going on. You got the podcast, you've got the show, and then you've got this party coming up. Maybe start in reverse order. Where's the party? When is it? How do people get tickets to it? Tell us about that and then tell us about the content.

• 47:22Speaker 02

  Right. So I've been doing these parties, maximalist parties. I think Bitcoin maximalism or so-called toxic maximalism gets a bad name. I think there's a place. I'm trying to like almost brand toxic maximalism. I got another hat here.

• 47:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Max got more merch than anyone.

• 47:41Speaker 02

  I got this from Samson Mao, this toxic maximalist hat. But I think there's a place for it. And so we've been doing these parties. We did one in Austin recently. This next one's in Phoenix on August 19th. You can get tickets. If you follow me on Twitter, there's always links to the tickets. There's still a few tickets left. So it's like a meetup meets like a punk punk rock. I mean, it's like, it's a, the bar is open. You know, it's a conference without the, without the conference. It's just the party part of the conference. So we have like Will Reeves from Fold is going to be there talking about Fold. We've got other people in the Bitcoin space that are going to be there. We've got the local Bitcoin crowd is showing up to this. So it's a way to go into town, get all the Bitcoin folks

• 48:26Speaker 02

  there, have a huge meetup, but add some booze. And I do like a 30 minute rage where I just go nuts for 30 minutes, which I've been doing for many years. And it's developed its own unique art form. The rage has an art form. So we've been doing more and more of these and it's called, you know, this is kind of the title of it. You know, we go after Elon because, you know, he's kind of a clown in a lot of ways. And he said some nasty things about about El Salvador and about node operators and, you know, we have some fun with it. But anyway, that's coming up on August 19th in Phoenix. Tickets are available.

• 49:04Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. And then what's the show and RT and the podcast?

• 49:08Speaker 02

  Right, so the podcast is the Orange Pill Podcast on YouTube. That's Max and Stacy. And we do two of those a week, sometimes three a week. The RT Show is still going. It's on RT. You can find it on YouTube. It's been going on for 13 years. We've done over 1,700 episodes. Three or four years ago, they started to dub that show into Spanish. And now it's the most watched show on the entire RT network, both English and Spanish. It gets 20 million viewers a week. It gets a lot of times one or two million views on YouTube. It's, it's, and as you know, we've been talking about Bitcoin this whole time. So it's, we've had everybody who's ever, you know, the players on Bitcoin.

• 49:53Speaker 02

  We've always had them going back many years. And so that's, that's the RT Show.

• 50:00Anthony Pompliano?

  And if people want to follow you on Twitter for obviously all of the articulate content that you have there, where can we send them?

• 50:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, so admittedly, a lot of the things I say and do on Twitter are, you know, not, don't qualify as articulate. But nevertheless, my Twitter handle is Max Kaiser. Stacy Herbert is Stacy Herbert.

• 50:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolute creative geniuses, both of you. Listen, thank you so much for, for taking the time to do this. People absolutely enjoyed it. And I think that the same message you've been saying for a decade, more and more people need to hear it. So thanks so much for, for all the efforts you and Stacy both had early on and the work you guys continue to do. We, we all just appreciate it.

• 50:42Speaker 02

  It was great to meet John Pompliano.

• 50:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, if you don't follow him, he's going to be really heartbroken. So he's expecting.

• 50:48Speaker 02

  I'm definitely going to follow him. Prepare to get a thousand new followers, John.

• 50:54Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, Max. Thank you so much for doing this. We'll definitely do it to get in the future.

• 50:57Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks so much, Pom. See ya.

• 50:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Bye, guys.